So now the Great Leader and ardent James Bond fan is busy adding atomic weapons to his large chemical and biological arsenal trained on Seoul and within striking distance of Tokyo, Alaska and -- some believe -- even California. Hollywood included.

What happened to the Kim Jong Il of 2000, smiling peacefully in his receding bouffant? After his summit with South Korea, relatives got to visit. Kidnappings of Japanese schoolchildren were admitted. South Korean President Kim Dae-jung got a Nobel Peace Prize.

Forgotten was the brutality of this communist relic run by the chubby son of a tyrant installed by Stalin himself. Reeling in self-induced economic collapse, North Korea has already starved 2 million people to death. Seven million more may run out of food within months. Pyongyang lowered the height requirement for its "million-man army" to 4 feet, 2-inches, a necessary adjustment to child starvation. And Kim Jong Il spends foreign aid on French wines, Mercedes and Bond movies.

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Human Rights Watch also notes the death camps where newcomers bury corpses. There are no bicycles, much less cars, on the streets. But visitors report seeing women with rakes and shovels maintaining immaculate roadside flower beds for the motorcades.

Foreign aid is all that keeps Kim Jong Il's brutal regime alive.

So the Great Leader is again resorting to nuclear blackmail, used with marvelous effect on the Clinton and now Bush administrations, despite Bush's vow not to negotiate. The Korean Central News Agency scoffed at Bush's latest cave: "The U.S.'s loudmouthed supply of energy and food aid are like a painted cake pie in the sky."

It was half a century ago that the United States went to war to protect impoverished South Korea from attack by the Soviet-backed North. Today, the United States still billets 37,000 troops in South Korea.

But now these soldiers are under attack from South Koreans gathering in huge anti-American protests, complaining that the United States -- whose protection allowed South Korea to become an industrial power -- is to blame for Kim Jong Il's threats.

One GOP lawmaker and former Korea hawk now argues privately for a pullout. The South seems less disturbed by the North's atrocities than by the potential costs of a German-style reunification, he said. South Korean industrialists like the North's cheap labor.

Former National Security Adviser Richard Allen publicly called for withdrawal, noting that Seoul is cynically posing as a "mediator" between the United States and the North. South Koreans are "free to continue to prop up a ruthless regime with large-scale investments by Hyundai," Allen argued, but the question is why U.S. taxpayers should support this.

U.S. troops are serving as "nuclear hostages," protecting a dubious ally, says Ted Galen Carpenter, a Cato Institute defense analyst, while rich South Korea could pay for its own defense.

"It's time not only to withdraw the troops, but to turn key policy decisions over to the South Koreans," Carpenter says. Conditions "bear no resemblance" to 1953. South Korea is strong, he says, and "certainly Russia and China don't want war on the Korean Peninsula."

If 37,000 American nuclear hostages are a problem for South Korea, maybe they should leave.